RETURN OF THE BATTLESHIP
A film review by Felix Kreisel
Copyright 1996 Iskra Research
Montreal 1996 The recently concluded Montreal World Film Festival is one of the better known venues of the cinema world. It attempts to promote a wide range of filmmakers from many countries by requiring as little as possible in promotion expenditures. This year the Festival organizers paid special attention to current Russian films and even gave a special prize in the category of the Russian Cinema of Today. This writer was able to view a number of the more significant films presented at the Festival. Preceding my impressions I have included the official descriptions provided by the Festival organizers.
* * * * * * * * * * Return Of The Battleship
* * * * * * * Official information * * * * * * *
Director: Gennady Poloka. Script: Vladimir Bragin, Gennady Poloka. Based on the novel "Return of the Battleship" by A. Kapler. Photography: Yevgeny Davidov. Editors: E. Guralskai, T. Maliavina. Music: Veniamin Basner. Sound: G. Kravetsky, A. Koniaiev. Cast: Mikhail Urzhumtsev, Liudmila Potapova, Yelena Maiorova, Vladimir Sterzhakov, Tatiana Vasilieva, Armen Dzhigarkhanian, Ivan Bortnik, Vasily Mischenko, Ernst Romanov, Valery Nosik, Boris Novikov, Boris Brunov, Igor Kvasha, Alexei Buldakov. Producer: Mikhail Zusmanovich, Gennady Poloka, Ritm Studios.
Dashing German cavalry officer Johann Frantsevich Hertz loved the Revolution and fought to defend it in wartime against the "White Russians" and in peace against the NEP, against prostitution, against anybody and anything that he thought a threat to its success. Then he fell in love with Klavdiia and he threw himself into his affair with her with the same passion as he had previously shown for revolution. But many things emerged to prevent their happiness: Hertz' fictitious wife, the secretary of the Odessa communist party, a bag of fried sunflower seeds, and an Eisenstein unknown to the inhabitants of Odessa.
* * * * * ) Iskra Research; by F. Kreisel * * * * *
This movie was for me one of the highlights of the Festival. From the first moment it appeals to the viewer with its boisterous visual love of Odessa, one of the architectural and cultural jewels of the Black Sea coast. I am not an Odessit, but have visited the city as a child, and shall forever remember the loud humor of its inhabitants, the intricate funny patois of its language which mixes Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Romanian and a few other languages, the white acacia trees on the wide boulevards, ice cream parlors, the historic steps, the busy port and markets. There are other lovely port cities in this world, Marseilles and San Francisco come to mind when seeing the panorama of Odessa. It is a lovely feeling to watch the city scenes in this movie. It is one of the few current Russian movies to show us real street scenes, crowds, street cars full of passengers, shops, a beach crowded with bathers. The story itself centers on a German, Johann Hertz, who had read Bakunin and Nietzsche at the Goettingen University, but turned to Karl Marx for a true explanation of capitalist society, and in the crucible of World War I and the Russian Revolution has come to the aid of the young Soviet republic. Hertz joined the Communist party in 1918 and had served in Primakov's Ukrainian cavalry corps, was badly wounded in the Civil War, and has now been demobilized and sent to recuperate in Odessa's mild climate. The year is 1925, Lenin had died a year before, the New Economic Policy is in full swing and that social inequality, against which Hertz has been fighting since 1918, is blooming once again in the new Russia. Hertz from the first is portrayed as an oddball. He wears a cavalry uniform with blue cross chevrons and a blue star on his hat, not the normal red star and chevrons. He does not drink, curse, stuff himself, abuse women or come late to the office. His prized possession are his books. The boorish Odessa regional Party secretary appoints Hertz to head the local artists' employment bureau despite Hertz' protestations that he knows nothing of art. From this vantage point we are treated to a comic view of the entertainment industry in the city, a kaleidoscope of opera baritones, circus performers, cinema has beens, burlesque dancers, magicians, and so on. Hertz' efforts to bring some order to this chaos of bribe taking, fake ration cards and IDs, pseudo-cultural and pseudo-proletarian pseudo-art are futile but funny. In the first half of this film we see nothing of the new truly revolutionary and liberating art. Hertz seems overwhelmed by the hacks left over from the bon monde of pre-revolutionary Odessa. Meanwhile he is hustled into a fake marriage with a local floozy, whom he tries to educate in Marxism, and falls into a true love at first sight with beautiful and kind Klavdiia, a single mother of two girls. Then Odessa is visited by the team of Moscow film makers under the direction of Sergei Eisenstein who is here to make a movie of the famous 1905 mutiny on the battleship Potemkin. We are now in for a fabulous treat. We get to see the making of this world shaking movie, we hear Eisenstein's method explained, we see how the cast were recruited, the stages set up, the hundreds of unprofessional extras instructed in their roles, how the structure of this film emerges from the scaffolding of this ant-like activity. Hertz' single minded and narrow barrack-style communism prevents him from realizing the revolutionary creativity of Eisenstein's methods and he tilts at windmills (literally) trying to prevent the filming of the famous Odessa Steps scene of the movie. Fortunately for us he does not succeed. Neither does Hertz succeed in liberating himself from the straitjacket of official rules and directives of his office and the Party secretary. Although Klavdiia did get a part in the filming of "The Battleship" (she plays the part of a Jewish mother of a little boy killed on the Odessa steps by the Cossacks), she is soon unemployed again. Klavdiia is forced to sell sunflowers seeds on the street to feed her family, is caught by the militia, brought into Hertz' office and he cancels her actor's employment card, her proof of legitimacy. The new Soviet bureaucracy swallows Hertz and destroys his chance for happiness. Klavdiia's curse shatters Hertz' inner fortitude. Then the finished movie "Battleship Potemkin" comes to town. The director, Gennady Poloka, correctly presents the magnificently ennobling effect of this masterpiece on the town's population. People are excited by the movie, both about the actual revolutionary events of 20 years ago, about their own roles in the Revolution and in the filming of the movie. Hertz, however, has now become completely unhinged. Seeing Klavdiia in her dramatic role of the desolate mother on the Odessa steps brings to him his own action in letting down the only woman he ever loved, and who loved him. Hertz sees her life and death on the screen time after time. His own life is over, he lives only on the screen. We see him much later, a lunatic dressed in the old army rags, still coming to see "The Battleship" in a deserted theater. The scenes from the movie "The Battleship" are one of the strong and uplifting notes in this wonderful film. They give evidence that the October Revolution did not spring from a secretive and conspiratorial coup by a tiny group of disciplined and ruthless Bolsheviks but was a rising of the whole Russian nation. The presentation of Communist Party life in 1925 as a series of orchestrated meetings full of illiterate sloganeering by boorish louts in high positions is an ahistorical projection of the later Stalinist period backwards. This is a common view in Russia and is fostered both by the past Stalinist lies and the present anti communist propaganda. Fortunately, we have other evidence. The memoirs of Baitalsky ("Notebooks For Grandchildren"), a young Odessa communist of that period who was later jailed for Oppositional activity and spent decades in the GULag, tell us of mass literary, artistic, theatrical, musical activities among the young Communists and the spirit of self sacrifice, egalitarianism and freedom which prevailed in their midst. The bureaucratic regimentation did come later, but it came as a result of the planned persecution of idealistic and devoted Communists of the Hertz type, their gradual hounding out of the Party and their replacement with careerists and lackeys. The period beginning with Lenin's illness and death witnessed a transformation of the Bolshevik party. In Ukraine, the leader of Communist party during the Civil War, Khristian Rakovsky, supported Trotsky in the 1923 party debate and was recalled from his post. Some leaders underwent moral and political degeneration, e.g. Stalin and Bukharin. Other leaders of the heroic period were gradually supplanted by pragmatic apparatus men, for example Trotsky and Zinoviev were replaced by Voroshilov and Molotov. Along with the organized opposition activity there were a number of suicides out of despair or in protest, yet such suicides occurred more frequently after the possibility for legal opposition was exhausted. In Ukraine, one of the leading party organizers, Yevgeniia Bosh, one of the signatories of the Platform of the 46, committed suicide in 1924. The leading Soviet diplomat and a long time supporter of Trotsky, Adolf Joffe, took his life in protest at Trotsky's expulsion from the party in 1927. The director intentionally and incorrectly paints Hertz as a lonely Don Quixote, and Hertz' ideal of a world commune as an impossible dream. Similarly, of all the heroes of communism, only Marx is shown on posters and placards in the movie; other towering figures of the communist world: Engels, Luxembourg, Lenin and Trotsky are not even mentioned. Hertz is presented as the only true communist, yet Odessa was one of the centers of oppositional activity at that time. Such a picture of a lone individual against an indifferent world is belied by the movie itself. Some of the most powerful sequences in this movie occur when the Odessa audiences see themselves in the movie reenacting the heroic events of the 1905 Revolution. These moments offer us a hint of that spirit of heroic self sacrifice when masses of people throughout Russia were animated by Hertz' dream of world communism. It was this dream which moved millions of working people in 1917, and which today is still the only hope for mankind. -- Iskra Research -- Historical research and publication of Marxist classics in the Russian language. Address: PO Box 397142, Cambridge, MA 02139-7142; e-mail: fjk@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/fjk/iskra.html
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